New York
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Subversive Nun’s Sophisticated Plot to Incite Peace By Peter Rugh
Tears welled up in my eyes when I heard that 83-year-old Catholic nun Megan Rice is facing 20 years in prison — a sentence that, if delivered to the fullest extent this September, would essentially condemn her to spend the rest of her life behind bars. Unlike me, however, she reportedly smiled when the jury… Continue reading
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Repressing “Un-American Activities”: The Historical Roots of Today’s Homeland Surveillance State By Greg Guma
Political rights are so easily taken for granted – until they’re threatened or curtailed by repressive laws. In the United States, they are usually most vulnerable when people are anxious about some outside threat. Continue reading
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Video: "A Massive Surveillance State": Glenn Greenwald Exposes Covert NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails
The National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies — including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top-secret program, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows… Continue reading
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Video: “A Massive Surveillance State”: Glenn Greenwald Exposes Covert NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails
The National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies — including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top-secret program, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows… Continue reading
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“We Steal Secrets” The New Movie About Wikileaks Infuriates Wikileaks By Danny Schecter
You could say that Wikileaks, the subject of We Steal Secrets also began with a fury – a fury against war and secrecy, and was moving as fast as it could to challenge media complacency in the digital realm. Now, it is being ganged up on by a media that invariably builds you up before… Continue reading
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Freedom Rider: Chickens Roost in Woolwich By Margaret Kimberley
Two British-Nigerians frightened the great former colonial empire to death by nearly beheading a soldier, in London. Yet British and other western politicians have far more blood on their hands than the young Africans. “This killing was no more awful than those committed by the military from the U.S. or other NATO nations.” Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘The Planet Can’t Keep Doing Us A Favour’ By David Cromwell
The false ‘balance’ in climate journalism is heavily skewed by the supposed need to share time between climate science and climate science denial. This is irrational ‘journalism’ by media professionals who have been seduced by a stubborn minority of people who ‘refuse to accept that climate change is happening despite the overwhelming scientific evidence’ Continue reading
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“The machiavelian threefold game of the neoconservatives” by Laurent Guyénot
To realize their fantasies of world domination, the neocons resorted to a triple discourse, as Laurent Guyénot shows in this study, i.e. a cynical political philosophy developed by their mentor Leo Strauss for domestic consumption; a cold analysis of Israeli strategic interests for the benefit of leaders in Tel Aviv, and a fear-mongering warning against… Continue reading
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The Islamist State: What the Syrian Constitution says about Assad and the Rebels By Stephen Gowans
The idea that the uprising against the Syrian government is inspired by a grassroots movement thirsting for a pluralist, democratic state is a fiction. Continue reading
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Still Getting Gitmo Wrong By Peter Hart
President Barack Obama’s address yesterday on U.S. terror strategies got a lot of attention for supposedly charting a new course in America’s longest war. But some of the facts were mangled along the way. Continue reading
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America’s Ecological Precipice by Robert Hunziker
Alaska is a good-sized part of the Arctic, the world’s epicenter of climate change, where sensitivity to human-caused global warming is magnified much more than in the 48 lower states, but the likely consequences of this climatic drama have not sunk in with the public, just yet. Continue reading
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Video: FAIR TV: PBS and Koch, Guatemala and the U.S. Role and Rumsfeld Meets the Press
This week: PBS won’t be showing us the documentary Citizen Koch–for some very dubious reasons. Also: The New York Times points out that the U.S. role in supporting genocide in Guatemala was hardly discussed at the trial; the same goes for U.S. media coverage of that trial. And Donald Rumsfeld goes on Meet the Press… Continue reading
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Media Disinformation and the Conspiracy Panic Phenomenon By James F. Tracy
To posit that one’s government may be partially composed of unaccountable criminal elements is cause for serious censure in polite circles. Labeled “conspiracy theories” by a corporate media that prompt and channel emotionally-laden mass consent, such perspectives are quickly dispatched to the memory hole lest they prompt meaningful discussion of the political prerogatives and designs… Continue reading
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Verizon (and Google) Helped U.S. Government to Spy on Reporters By Pratap Chatterjee
Technology companies willingly provided information to U.S. government agencies to help the Obama administration snoop on reporters from the Associated Press (AP) and Fox news in order to ostensibly crack down on leaks that pose a “threat” to national security. Continue reading
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Obama-Media Scandals- Only the Tip of The Iceberg: Wiretapping of US Congress & Using NGOs as Traps for Whistleblowers
Isn’t it ironic? After more than a decade of intensive government witch-hunting directed toward government whistleblowers and truth-tellers- who also happen to be the most valuable sources when it comes to media and journalism, the US media has suddenly become alert and apprehensive to its government’s decade-long snooping, targeting, persecuting, and prosecuting of information-transparency sources.… Continue reading
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A Conspiracy To Commit Journalism: The Justice Dept’s Dangerous New Argument Threatens Basic Reporting
Secrecy expert Steven Aftergood wrote, the government’s argument “all but eliminates the traditional distinction in classified leak investigations between sources, who are bound by a non-disclosure agreement, and reporters, who are protected by the First Amendment as long as they do not commit a crime.” Continue reading
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Bum Rap: The U.S. Role in Guatemalan Genocide By Peter Hart
The U.S. role in facilitating genocide was not central to the trial of Ríos Montt, but the fact remains that U.S. aid helped fuel the military, and Reagan-era officials like Elliott Abrams brushed off concerns about atrocities against indigenous villages. As Malkin put it, “For some in Guatemala, the virtual invisibility of the American role… Continue reading
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My Big Fat Greek Minister By Greg Palast
Fat Bastard – or Theodoros Pangalos, leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), Greece’s equivalent to UK’s Labour Party – thinks the little Greek kiddies should stop belly-aching. Pangalos, as you can see from the photo below, is not bent over with hunger pains. In fact, he looks more likely to be bent over with… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 